President Obama has extended an invite to Ahmed to show his clock off at the White House: https://twitter.com/potus/status/644193755814342656
It's about time. (sorry)
14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School
631–640 of 994 posts
Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School
#632Earlier quoted context omitted.
Running seti / etc on the school computers does result in thousands of dollars spend on extra electricity. He was number one on SETI for years, running the client without approval on 5,000 machines. It's not surprising that people get fired for increasing costs by that much without getting approval first. See also http://www.securityfocus.com/news/300
Were the machines always on regardless? Wouldnt they have consumed some portion of the said electricity no matter what? Or was he preventing the machines from being shutdown or sleeping?
The software runs on lowest priority. So when people are using the computer the software just sits there, not doing much. After a few minutes of inactivity the seti software (which sometimes was a screensaver) would kick in. Rather than sleeping or idling the computer would be doing computationally intensive work. Some distributed stuff (especially Prime95) is used specifically because it makes the computer work hard - it's a reliable stress test. This causes extra power to be used for the processor and the fans.
Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School
#633This whole situation screams a breach of the poor boy's liberties. According to TEX. FAM. CODE §51.095 [1]: In order for a custodial written statement to be admissible, the following sequence of events must occur: 1) the officer must take the child to a magistrate; 2) the magistrate must then inform the child of his rights to remain silent, to have an attorney appointed and present during questioning and to terminate…
That is for a custodial interrogation. With some caveats, you aren't in a custodial interrogation until you are arrested.
The violation of his rights was the insane arrest when clearly no law was violated.
Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School
#634Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. To quote the Police spokesman; "He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation" and "The concern was, what was this thing built for?" Why shouldn't he make his own clock?! Why does there need to be a 'broader explanation'? How can one develop an interest in anything if you must first provide an adequate explanation? sigh
Why are you trying to teach me English? This teacher should be arrested for trying to overthrow the government... What is the "broader explanation" for this English textbook?
Communicate with others.
Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School
#635Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Thank goodness he never took a clock he'd built into school. Uh... From Steve Jobs's biography: In twelfth grade he [Woz] built an electronic metronome—one of those tick-tick-tick devices that keep time in music class—and realized it sounded like a bomb. So he took the labels off some big batteries, taped them together, and put it in a school locker; he rigged it to start ticking faster when the locker opened. Late…
Of course the difference here is Woz both fully intended mischief, knew he could get in trouble, but in general had the expectation that he would get away with it in the long term.
Ahmed will "get away with it in the long term" as well. He will probably be even better off after this episode. He is going to have the attention of all sorts of great people including the president.
But of course that isn't particularly the problem here. When something like this comes up and catches our attention, there is outrage until that specific situation is fixed. We all pat ourselves on the back for helping this one person and move on forgetting that nothing that allowed this situation to happen in the first place has been changed.
Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School
#636Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure it's always diatribe when you don't agree. "Asking for trouble" is what I mean. The default processes in the USA are not what I'm talking about, but everyone here is defending his "right to be creative". Nobody is saying "hang on, he put a clock in a case, brought it to school, not part of any school project, advised not to show it around, showed it around anyway and was passive aggro when asked about it". H…
It makes me sad that showing off something you made can be seen as "asking for trouble."
It wasn't just "something", it was a case with a timer inside and wires and circuits.
His "invention" was not anything useful. The only useful function I can think of for such a device, is actually a hoax bomb for drama class. What good is a clock inside a case?
I'm getting down-voted to all hell, but that's what one gets for backing one's argument in a den of trigger-happy bigot-hunters.
He showed it to his engineering teacher. If he'd left it there, everything would have been okay. But he took it to English class.
His mother blamed racial profiling, but does that mean his ethnicity or his religion or both? Does he practice Islam? 14 year old kids studying Islam on the side, then bringing cases packed with electronics to school, then being coy when asked about it? It adds up to trouble in anyone's language.
Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School
#637Earlier quoted context omitted.
Running seti / etc on the school computers does result in thousands of dollars spend on extra electricity. He was number one on SETI for years, running the client without approval on 5,000 machines. It's not surprising that people get fired for increasing costs by that much without getting approval first. See also http://www.securityfocus.com/news/300
Were the machines always on regardless? Wouldnt they have consumed some portion of the said electricity no matter what? Or was he preventing the machines from being shutdown or sleeping?
Running Folding@Home, SETI@Home, Prime95, and other CPU intensive applications requires much more power than simply running idle. For example, I have a processor that when running Prime95 will use more than double the idle load wattage. [0]
[0] http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2010/04/27/amd-phenom-...
Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School
#638President Obama has extended an invite to Ahmed to show his clock off at the White House: https://twitter.com/potus/status/644193755814342656
potus done good
Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School
#639Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having lived in the deep south most of my life I think I understand what's going on here. It's not that they're afraid of things they don't understand. It's that there is a certain type of person they generally don't like. In this case it might have been a man that had some sort of intellectual curiosity, maybe a bit eccentric. And they will use their ignorance as a weapon against those people. The police department…
I think it's both: ignorance is the source of their power, and they are afraid of losing it. (I also grew up in the South.)
> ignorance is the source of their power
Ignorance is a source of power only within a like-minded group, and only as long as that group is powerful.
Now get out of there and see where ignorance gets you.
Or wait until that group washes out into the irrelevance of history.
Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School
#640Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bigotry, maybe. There's a chance (which I'd estimate at smaller than 1%) that there was no racial motivation here. But I don't see how you can say there's no grounds to make accusations of ignorance and cowardice. Being unaware of what a bomb looks like is clearly ignorance, and being so terrified that you get an innocent kid arrested for it is clearly cowardice.
Handcuffs went too far. But that's a protocol issue for US lawmakers etc. We've all seen protocol out of control in the States for a host of different incidents. No need to react so much in the other direction either, making this kid an ambassador of "freedom to pack electronics in a case and bring it to school" or whatever. He made an error of judgement going against his teacher's advice, and a ton of bricks came do…
> But you can't deny that "radicalization of young Muslims" isn't a thing these days.
Radicalization of young Muslims is among the reasons why acts based on bias against young Muslims by authority figures in society is especially problematic, as those acts contribute rather directly to such radicalization, and directly serve the propaganda interests of those actively seeking such radicalization.
This would be problematic if radicalization of young Muslims wasn't a particular concern, but it doesn't become less problematic because such radicalization is a real thing, it becomes more.